Re: Scrabble, Officially

In article <6517mkF2d3at5U1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 Greg Goss <gossg@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> bill van <billvan@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
> >In article <qKSdneSUJK0AqnbanZ2dnUVZ_ufinZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> 
> >> No, the rules were consistent, they just allowed for cheating under 
> >> certain cir***stances. It was kind of like politics in that regard.
> >
> >Ah, but those words you think of as examples of the computer cheating
-- 
> >ar and qi, say -- are consistent with an official set of rules that 
> >allow the way letters sound to be spelled out, and that allow
qualifying 
> >foreign words that are rendered into English. 
> 
> Then it's no longer the game it was advertised to be.  Once you start
> allowing some weird foreign words in, then why not any word ever
> spoken in any language?

You work with whatever the authority is, generally the Official Scrabble 
Players Dictionary, authorized by the makers of Scrabble and the (U.S.) 
National Scrabble Association. My third edition, which will be well out 
of date by now, includes AR as "the letter R" but not QI.
> 
> Play the game with a dictionary in the native language of the players.

That works so long as all the players can speak and spell the language 
in question. Failing that, there's no reason to play the game.
> 
> >People who are into 
> >scrabble at a high level memorize lists of allowable two-letter words; 
> >they're handy for making overlapping words that score good points with 
> >modest letters. That you don't know them is your shortcoming, not the 
> >computer's. But the words you're making up are definitely not words. So

> >it's you cheating, actually. 
> 
> And AA and QI are not words either.  Once you start inserting words
> into the dictionary because they yield neat scores, it's not a game I
> will be playing with you.

I think you're way misunderstanding what I'm saying. AA is actually a 
word independent of the game: it means, according to the Scrabble 
Dictionary, "rough, cindery lava." QI isn't in my Scrabble Dictionary so 
can't be used in Scrabble at my house. I'm not sure if it's in my 
Oxford; if it is, it can be used.

But I was arguing for the principle that you need a consistent set of 
rules, whether they are restrictive or permissive. You can modify them 
at your house as you please, but you need rules to play that sort of 
game. Whether you approve of a particular word or not is neither here 
nor there.
> 
> When I was a teen, the house rules we ended up with were that we'd
> pick one of the five dictionaries in the house at random.  If the word
> that my brother had picked up somewhere wasn't in the dictionary we
> were using THIS TIME, then that's a chance he took for using a word
> that's not in mainstream English.

Mainstream, Schmainstream. We put an armful of (English-language) 
dictionaries on the table and if it's in any of them, it's legitimate.

-- 
bill
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